


and all that I can see is just a yellow lemon-tree

by AuroraKant



Series: Whumptober2020 [7]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics)
Genre: (Punching A Wall In Frustration), Angst, Dick Grayson Needs a Hug, Dick Grayson Whump, Dick Grayson-centric, Gen, Hallucinations, Isolation, Isolation Madness, Mental Breakdown, Mind Break, Open Ending, Self-Doubt, Self-Harm, Small Confinements, When you tell the voices in your head how much you love your dad and your dead brother
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:22:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26896633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuroraKant/pseuds/AuroraKant
Summary: Bruce had taught him what happened with the human mind when faced with forced isolation: Mood swings, paranoia, hallucinations, disillusions, and, of course, memory loss and a decrease in higher brain functions such as problem-solving skills and complex thought.From what Dick could tell he was already in the midst of the softer symptoms.Day 8: "Don't Say Goodbye" | Abandoned |Isolation
Series: Whumptober2020 [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1948651
Comments: 32
Kudos: 202
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	and all that I can see is just a yellow lemon-tree

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jinmukang](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jinmukang/gifts).



> Hello!  
> Jin wanted Isolation... Jin shall get Isolation!  
> I hope the rest of you are going to enjoy it as well! :D   
> (and yes the title is Lemon Tree from Fools Garden)  
> Kudos, Bookmarks, Comments and Feedback make my author heart beat faster! Love you guys! <3<3<3

The wall in front of him was bare.

The wall behind him was empty.

The wall to his left was only decorated with his bloody handprint.

The wall to his right was blank.

The only thing that Dick could see was the clock high above his head, red numbers counting down the time he had spent in this five on five-foot hell hole. Forty-six hours and twelve minutes, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three seconds.

His head hit the concrete with a small thud.

He just wanted to be let out. He wanted to run and jump and stretch and fight and fly and…

His entire body was aching from the fight that had ended with him in this hole, and his muscles screamed due to the lack of stretching. He couldn’t even lay on the floor on his back without his legs being bent to fit the enclosing confinements of his prison. His neck cracked every time Dick moved, since he had fallen asleep against the wall.

He hurt – and the isolation was starting to get to him.

Some part of him was just happy that it wasn’t complete sensory deprivation. Dick could still hear, and see, and feel. The concrete was rough beneath the palms of his hands, and the room smelled like sweat and human exhaust.

There was a hole in the middle of the small chamber for Dick to… well, for the byproducts of being alive. It was sick that Dick felt grateful for even that. But one of the few things that would make this experience worse, were the smell and disgust of shit and human excrement.

But it was probably better if Dick didn’t focus on that.

A small echo danced through the room when Dick sang or yelled or talked.

Nobody ever answered.

Dick had no clue why he was here, or what they planned on doing to him. He just knew that there was nothing he could actively do against it. It was hard enough to try and stay fit, his hands brushing against the walls on both sides when he did jumping jacks.

But he couldn’t idle.

Batman had taught him many things, and Dick would never forget the lesson about forced isolation: Batman had locked him in a room in the Cave, and while Dick had consented to the trainings unit and method, it had only taken fourteen hours before he had started to get confused.

Bruce had immediately freed him of the room, hugging him and calming him down. The next day they had started to work on coping mechanisms so that it would never happen again.

The simplest exercise was just that: Move. Talk. Stimulate.

Dick did push-ups even though his neck hurt, and he stretched against the wall even though there wasn’t enough room. He sang the lyrics to every pop song he could think off, and he even tried to hum the melodies of those weird K-Pop bands Tim listened to.

When he got tired, his muscles aching, his throat burning, he told good night stories to the clock. He had survived the first forty-six hours like this, he would survive the next as well.

The weird thing regarding the whole situation was… well, the bad guys did nothing else.

Nightwing had fought them in a desperate battle in the middle of Blüdhaven, and when they got the drop on him and subdued him, Dick had reckoned on being tortured. Instead he had woken up in this prison, his suit exchanged with soft sweatpants and a light shirt, his identity still protected by a mask.

Every twelve hours a tray with food got pushed through a hidden slit on the right wall, the action so fast Dick hadn’t managed to do anything but startle as the dish was pushed into his room. It tasted bland, but Dick was grateful for the food and the water.

Apparently, his captors didn’t plan on starving him.

No, they just locked him up and let him stew.

Dick hated to admit that it was working.

He wasn’t made for silence; he wasn’t built for the confinements of a small room like this. Bruce had tried his best in training it out of him, and he had managed to teach Nightwing how to wait and how to be quiet… but it had never been his strength, and it would never be to his enjoyment.

Another glance at the clock – forty-seven hours, seven minutes, thirteen seconds – told him that his self-mandated lunch hour was done.

His knees made a suspicious sound when Dick pushed himself into a standing position, but Dick chose to ignore that. He would get his brace on as soon as he had managed to find a weakness to his prison, as soon as he was breathing fresh air again.

First, he walked along the walls of the cell, each side taking two and a half steps for him to conquer. Then he slapped the walls, making sure that they were still just as sturdy as they had been the last time, he had checked them. He couldn’t allow himself any mistakes, and he needed to be ready should the enemy misstep.

Bracing himself against the wall behind him – the left wall with his bloody handprint on – Dick jumped and managed to jam himself between the two opposing walls. They were too far apart for him to hold this position long, but it allowed him to climb at least a few feet up in the direction of the clock.

Before long, his arms started to burn, and his knee buckled. He let himself fall onto the floor once more. Sweat was pouring down his back, the flimsy fabric sticking to his skin.

Dick closed his eyes, allowing himself a moment of calm, a moment to catch his breath, before he started his second fitness routine. He jumped and did push-ups. He even did a handstand and a split. But pure physical exhaustion could only do so much to push his thoughts away.

The isolation was gnawing on his nerves, no matter how much Dick was trying to pretend otherwise.

Maybe it was time to start singing again. Or talking.

Yeah, Dick wasn’t really in the mood for another Katy Perry song. Maybe he could… he could pretend to tell Tim something fun. But he would have to make sure that he was using codenames. Dick didn’t know what he would do should he accidentally reveal something to his captors – but he knew the shame of making a rookie mistake like that would follow him the rest of his life.

“Okay…”

His voice reverberated through the room, the grey color of the walls making everything seem even colder than it was. He sank towards the floor, his knees in front of him, so he could hug them close and make himself as small as possible. If he closed his eyes, he could almost convince himself that it was someone else hugging him close:

“Okay… so, I don’t think I’ve ever told you about the time B made ice cream. You know, homemade ice cream. It was a disaster. Agent A banned him from the kitchen because of that. But that is a spoiler isn’t it? Let me start from the beginning…”

Dick only stopped when his voice broke, hoarse from all the talking.

Fifty-three hours, fifty-one minutes, and one, two, three seconds.

He was bone tired. Soon, he would let sleep catch up with him again, his dreams reflections of the unrest he was feeling.

But maybe he could wait until he got food the next time. Five hours were doable, and Dick would rather not wake up to the sound of a tray being forcefully pushed into his cell. Not while he was vulnerable, not while there was nothing he could do to protect himself. He was restless enough as it was.

He didn’t need the added stress of disrupted sleep.

He took to counting the cracks in the cement, making it to two-hundred-and-fifty-two before the whispers in his head started. The doubt. The fear. The loneliness. The abandonment.

It was time for another work-out.

His entire body was tired, his eyelids wanting to fall closed, but Dick forced himself upwards, and he forced himself to run laps while staying stagnant on one spot. He had talked too much earlier, water sparse, and yet he threw words into the silence as a way to defend himself.

“Robin… you would have thought… that Agent A never swore… but I remember… when… when… the boy before you, when he got hit by a bully in his school… Agent A looked at B and said… he said ‘B, I rather hope you destroy that bastard’s life, because no one touches our boy and gets away with it’”

The anecdotes were random – or maybe they weren’t. Maybe each story Dick told was told for a reason, a rather simple one at that: Dick wanted to feel like that again. He wanted home, he wanted the Manor, he wanted Bruce and his misadventures in the kitchen, and Tim and the hero-worship in his eyes, that was slowly turning into brotherly admiration.

He wanted Alfred – and he wanted things he never had.

Alone stuck in this hole, Dick was reminded of the grief Jason had left like a shadow on all of their lives, and he remembered why he had stayed away for such long periods of time… but Dick would gladly take all the bad emotions and memories that colored his past with Bruce if only that meant that Dick would see another person again.

Being in the Manor kitchen sounded like the best thing on earth right now, and Dick would cry should he be granted a hug from his dad/mentor. Just… a hug… human contact… another voice besides his own… another person besides himself…

His fist connected with the wall on his left, a bloody smear joining the already existing handprint.

He couldn’t allow himself to go there. He couldn’t think like that… he couldn’t-

Next to his feet a small section of the wall opened, a tray being pushed inside with a scrapping sound. The opening had closed before Dick could react, his chest still heaving from the panic that had started to wrap itself around his chest.

His hand stung.

He looked at the blood slowly dripping down onto the floor, at the bruised and torn skin decorating his knuckles.

_Fuck._

He needed to get a grip on himself or this room would really break him.

For a short moment he allowed himself to close his eyes, the room swaying around him. This was bad… really, really bad, but there was nothing he could do but hold onto the hope that someone would come for him soon. There was nothing but the faint promise of a better future to keep him going, but Dick would take what he could get.

His knees cracked once more, when he settled back down onto the floor, the tray of food by his side. His stomach was growling in frustration, the last meal laying twelve hours in the past.

Once he was done, he folded the tray and the bowls on it – the food had tasted just like the paper mâché containers it had come in – and pushed them down the hole in the middle of the cell. He counted the seconds it took until they hit something, and the belated smash after five seconds told him that the end of the pipe was at least forty feet deep.

Not that Dick would fit in the small space, but he took every from of distraction he could get.

Counting was a good one, it allowed the brain to work and focus on other things, but Dick often needed to broaden his horizon – he quickly got bored by simple math as well.

One last look at the clock – fifty-nine hours, thirty-two minutes, and eleven, twelve, thirteen seconds – told him it was okay if he closed his eyes. It was okay that exhaustion was claiming him, and sleep was dragging him under.

It was okay if he lost his fight against unconsciousness – he had stayed strong long enough.

He woke up because of the voices. Loud voices, not that Dick could understand what they were saying. He blinked his eyes open, the last remnant of his dream still confusing him.

He had been fighting aliens in his dreams. Aliens and something big that looked a tiny bit like Bruce. And then Tim had been there… and Jason, but Jason had been crying. Dick wasn’t really sure what to make of it.

The clock above him told him that he had slept for a whooping seven hours – sixty-six hours, forty-one minutes, and six, seven, eight seconds – and he wasn’t quite sure why exactly the voices had woken him up. The next lunch time was in three and a half hours, and he had never heard any noises before that, his prison too well isolated to allow sounds from outside in. 

Or, so he had thought.

Because right now Dick could make out noises. It sounded like… it almost sounded like Bruce! Bruce and a younger voice by his side. Robin? Probably!

Batman and Robin had come to save him! Dick pushed himself off the floor, his heart beating fast in exhilaration. He was getting out of here! Out of this hellhole! Maybe he would even get a shower, the sweat coating his skin disgusting.

His hand trailed over the wall as he walked along each side of the room, trying to figure out from what direction the sound was coming from. But he couldn’t quite pinpoint it.

No matter how long he searched, Batman’s low grumble and the bright laughter of a kid stayed just out of reach. It was infuriating!

Dick was tempted to hit another wall, maybe try to break through the concrete in an effort to reach Bruce, but he wasn’t quite that desperate yet.

Batman would come for him soon.

Bruce would be here in only a moment.

That moment never came – instead, realization hit as once again Robin’s laughter echoed through the stone and Dick recognized it. That was Jason’s laughter. Tim only chuckled as Robin, making quips on the fly – but he rarely laughed a full-belly laugh even as Tim Drake.

But Jason?

Jason had been a firecracker on patrol, making Bruce grin and smile – and making himself laugh whenever his quip was especially funny.

Dick was hearing Jason laugh but… _but Jason was dead_.

This time there was nothing that could stop Dick from burying his hand in concrete, dust mixing with the blood leaking from his broken skin. Pain shot up Dick’s entire arm – a pulsing, bone-deep sensation radiating from his fist.

He had broken his hand.

It was the most real thing he felt in a long time.

_Fuck._

Dick knew how isolation worked, he knew that his brain was so starved for stimuli it was beginning to create and generate its own… and he knew that the longer he was locked up inside this small cell with no outside source of entertainment, the harder it would get for his brain to discern hallucination from reality.

He wasn’t hearing Bruce and Jason coming to save him, he was hearing the distorted echo of a memory trying to trick him.

With a sigh he let himself crumple, tears leaking from his mask, escaping from his eyes.

He missed Jason, he missed Bruce… he wanted to go home.

His hand was cradled against his chest, and Dick could do nothing to stop the feelings of failure from seeping in. He had tried his best and yet the things Bruce had trained him for had managed to break through his walls.

Some part of him was aware that Bruce would never be disappointed in him for something like this, but the larger part of his heart was sure that Batman would look at Nightwing and see failure. Their relationship had only just started to get better! They had only just started to get back into the groove!

And now… and now Dick’s traitorous brain was telling him that Bruce would no longer love him even if he managed to escape.

_It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real…_

But even if it wasn’t real, the tears chocking him were.

He had to get up, do his routine. He had to get a grip! He couldn’t fail now. He was Nightwing, he could never fail.

He was shaking when he finally managed to stand – he was shaking and falling apart and hurting, but he wasn’t broken yet. The first trip around the hole in the floor was harder than it should be, dread still pooling heavy in his stomach. But it got easier after that, easier to just bear the pain and continue, easier to just… not think but endure.

By the time the breakfast – was time even real? – tray got pushed inside the cell, Dick almost felt calm again. It had been seventy hours since he had woken up in this weird grey box of doom, and he was still hanging onto his sanity.

Soon someone would have to notice Dick was gone, even if he hadn’t activated his tracker, even if nobody had known Nightwing was in town fighting crime. Maybe someone would notice the lack of Nightwing decorating the night sky, or – far more likely – people would begin to miss Dick Grayson.

Dick Grayson had a day job and a forty-hour work week. He couldn’t just vanish without a trace. Someone would have to notice – and they would hopefully turn to Bruce, who would then channel everything he had into Batman and finding him.

Dick only had to keep on believing that and everything would turn out alright.

After a while he felt strong enough to start talking again, his voice a small relieve in the daunting quiet that threatened to swallow him.

“I… I have been talking to the current Robin, but you are on my mind a lot these days, Jay… We had a few good times, hadn’t we? Even if B got in the way, even if I had my outbursts… we had good times. Do you remember when we went skiing, Jay? That was great. Or that one time B was out of town and I convinced you to help me steal the Batmobile for a case… I had fun that weekend. Remember when Agent A caught us? All stern frown and harsh voice – and yet the both of us could see him smiling when he turned around.”

He did miss Jason, his little brother. Sometimes the pain of missing him was so harsh, so prominent, that Dick feared he would break over Jason’s death like Bruce had. But then Dick would look at his city, or he would see Tim and suddenly Dick knew that he couldn’t go down the same road his mentor had taken. No matter how much he wanted to.

Dick couldn’t lose himself in grief and sorrow. It would be unfair to Blüdhaven and it would be unfair to Tim.

And yet… often, when Dick was ill or sick or hurt, it was Jason that met him in his thoughts. It was Jason whose laugh echoed in Dick’s brain when the fever became to much, it was Jason who smiled and told Dick to get over himself.

Maybe the boy was watching over him like a guardian angel.

Dick liked that thought. The idea of Jason watching was so much more soothing than the fear that his mind was stretched too thin, that Dick was ready to break, even before all of this began.

The muscles in his legs were burning by the time Dick allowed himself to take a break. He had blindly run in circles, but at least he had forced the time to pass. The clock was telling him that it had been seventy-four hours, twenty-three minutes, and fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine seconds since his imprisonment began.

Eighteen more hours and he would be gone four days.

It sounded so little.

Three days spent in isolation should be nothing. Dick had spent longer being tortured, had survived confinements for thrice as long before becoming this agitated… but most people didn’t know what forced isolation was. And how fast it could affect the mind.

There was nothing new here to stimulate him, and it was sick to say, but the pain in his hand was really helping him focus.

The air was the same air he had been breathing for the last seventy-plus hours, and it smelled – heck, _he_ smelled. The clothes on his body were foreign, but absolutely nondescriptive, and soaked in sweat. He was freezing when he was still – cold, but never too cold – and warm and stifling when he was moving.

No matter what he did he couldn’t find a comfortable position to sleep, since this fucking place was too small!

It was infuriating.

Dick was unable to forget the situation he was in – and yet that situation never changed.

He just really, really wished it did.

He wouldn’t be able to climb due to his hurt hand, so Dick sat down, knowing that it would be some time before he stood up again. He was tired – _mentally tired_.

Bruce had taught him what happened with the human mind when faced with forced isolation: Mood swings, paranoia, hallucinations, disillusions, and, of course, memory loss and a decrease in higher brain functions such as problem-solving skills and complex thought.

From what he could tell he was already in the midst of the softer symptoms.

His emotions were crashing and burning and drowning him constantly, nothing ever staying long, but… well, the rage didn’t have to stay long to make him break his hand. Neither did the sorrow that swallowed him up periodically, nor the fierce energy that zapped through his body like mania.

And, well… Dick was aware that the voices he had heard earlier were auditory hallucinations.

But that meant he couldn’t trust anything he heard, and that would mean he wouldn’t know when someone actually came to save him…

Dick was so sick of this.

He wanted out. He wanted freedom and fresh air and just… _something_. Something that wasn’t gray and silent and dead.

He wanted to be able to trust himself again.

But that wouldn’t happen. At least not out of Dick’s own power – he’d seldomly felt as weak as he did right now.

He must have dozed off, or maybe he had gotten lost in his own thoughts, but suddenly the small hatch next to him opened, and the tray got pushed inside. His eyes flew to the clock and, yes – eighty-two hours, zero minutes, and three, four, five seconds – the fourth day of his imprisonment was underway.

The food tasted even blander than usual, his stomach churning with the knowledge that he had lost time. Where had it gone? Maybe Dick had really just napped. It was hard to say with the light never changing, and a haze beginning to cover his thoughts.

Bruce would be so disappointed.

But, hey, maybe… no, Dick had no _maybe_ waiting for him. It wasn’t as if he was dying, he was just going insane. His body was perfectly alright, it was merely his mind that was put through a wringer. He had hoped to see Jason again – and, hey, maybe he would in the confines of his mind – but there was no chance for an afterlife.

_Stop._

Dick had to stop thinking like this. He had to get a grip, wrestle the control back, fight for his own sanity if need be! He would do it! _He had to do it!_

Dick pushed the tray away from him, scrambling to get to his feet. His hand screamed in pain during each jumping jack Dick forced his body through, but he prevailed. He wouldn’t crumble, he wouldn’t fall this easily…

The clock read eighty-eight hours, thirty-four minutes and nine, ten, eleven seconds when Dick’s body crashed, sleep claiming him against his will.

Dick slept through the delivery of the ninety-four-hour food, and his mind was blissfully blank when he blinked his eyes open some time later. Sadly, the numbness could not stay… thoughts and fears and ideas slowly returned to his consciousness, forcing him to confront his own reality.

His head was pulsing with a fierce headache, and Dick wished sleep back. But, no, he was awake and the light piercing his eyes wouldn’t let him vanish again.

There were voices in his ear, but Dick was almost sure they weren’t real. Just as the pulsing figures escaping the corner of his eyes weren’t real… He was breaking, but nothing was lost just yet.

He scrambled upwards, his arm almost landing in the untouched food, when a stabbing pain in his hand reminded him of the fact that he had broken his fist earlier – yesterday. That had been yesterday. At least Dick thought so.

It was incredibly hard to recall any information with any amount of certainty, so Dick gave up trying.

Instead, he wrestled muscles that didn’t want to move, and a mind that just wanted to sleep, into a position he could use.

He started by doing stretches, his neck making a truly horrible sound when he did so. His knees were stinging, and when Dick folded one of his legs behind his ears, he could feel the ligaments ready to give. Okay, so no stretching for his legs and knees… Dick could do that. He would find something else to occupy his mind with.

Time moved like molasses around him.

No matter how much he moved, how much he exercised, the number on the clock barely changed – ninety-six hours, forty-four minutes, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine seconds – Dick just exhausting himself.

There was a tingling sensation running through his entire body, and Dick could feel the nervous energy taking hold of him. He needed to do something. _Anything_. He needed to run and rush and fly and fight. But he couldn’t do _it_.

The space was too small for something big and his hand hurt – _hey, there was blood on the wall_ – but that couldn’t stop him. Wouldn’t stop him.

Shadow boxing didn’t bring the same satisfaction that real sparring did, but at least some of the tension in his shoulders eased. It didn’t matter that his fist shook with pain and depletion when he hit the dancing shadows in front of him, it didn’t matter that he was destroying his hand permanently.

He just needed something to keep the nervousness at bay.

If he started to think right now Dick knew exactly where his thoughts would wander… he knew which depths he would be forced to explore, and he wasn’t ready for that just yet. He would never be ready for that. It was easier to hit something that wasn’t really there, than to face the horrors living in his heart.

Especially since these horrors grew louder and louder, yelling obscenities echoing through his mind.

He wouldn’t think, couldn’t think – he wouldn’t bow, especially not yet.

Bruce would come for him. Batman and Robin would save him.

Dick would be okay, he just knew it.

He startled when the hatch opened during the one-hundred-and-sixth hour, and food was pushed inside his cell. He hadn’t eaten breakfast yet.

Monsters were trying to eat him, and no matter what Dick did he couldn’t convince himself that they were only figments of his imagination.

His imagination was the only thing he had left, and even if it was his head betraying him, it was the only one he had. What was he supposed to do? Exchange it?

The glowing read numbers above him were his only guidance, even if Dick was not entirely sure what they were telling him.

One-hundred-and-seventy-three followed by a space and the number thirty-two followed by the very quickly changing numbers six-seven-eight-nine…

Dick had stared so intensely at the thing above him, it had lost all meaning. It was…a clock. Telling time. But what could time tell him if he had no concept for it?

Dick wanted home – whatever _this_ was, it was no longer fun. He smelled pungent and his stomach grumbled… was there food strewn around him?

He didn’t dare to eat it. The monsters in his brain liked to attack when he ate. They came out and yelled at him. Or they said mean things. Sometimes they looked like Batman, telling him that neither Dick nor Robin were welcome in the Cave any longer. Sometimes it was Jason and he was crying for help.

More often than not it was Kory, asking him why he had left her, why he had hurt her. Sometimes she would try to hurt him to, and Dick could only agree… he deserved it.

But there were others as well, the faces of people he couldn’t save waiting for him in the reflection of the water he was trying to drink. The voices of the dead invading his sleep and his dreams – making the act of closing his eyes a special form of torture as well.

There was just so much noise – and that even though Dick was aware that he was bathed in silence.

It was weird, this existence split in two.

The last remnants of his logical brain knew that he was hallucinating, that something – probably isolation – had eaten away all his defenses, leaving him soft and confused and hurt. The bigger part of him, though, flinched at every shadow, knowing it was a loved one he had disappointed.

There was blood on the wall and Dick had no idea where it came from.

He was hungry.

The clock above him read one-hundred-and-seventy-nine, fifty-two, sixteen-seventeen-nineteen.

Dick no longer cared for what that meant.

Sometimes when he blinked the numbers displayed jumped ahead, sometimes they didn’t move at all.

Sometimes immense fear cursed through his veins, other times he was just angry.

Sometimes Dick answered the voices in his head:

“No… No, I am not sorry, B… I did what I had to do… I did what I needed to do”

Or:

“Why can’t you understand? I hoped you at least would understand!”

Or:

“I should have been there, Jay… I really, really should have been there.”

None of the people Dick had hurt accepted his apology. None of them were there to hear it. Instead the gray walls seemed to be coming closer, pressing the air from his lungs. The claustrophobia was getting to him – hah, Dick hadn’t even known he was afraid of enclosed spaces before he was forced to exist in one!

How long…? Dick wasn’t sure. He didn’t want to know anymore, if he was being honest, he just wanted to be free.

But what did freedom even feel like? Taste like? Dick had no idea what fresh air smelled like anymore, or if grass really felt like Dick imagined it to feel. It was weird – it was as if his own brain was being rewritten, his entire reality being composed of this _one_ room.

It was the world outside that started to feel fake.

Dick didn’t like that at all – but as he wondered what ice cream really tasted like, he realized that there was very little he could do to stop it from happening.

Batman had taught him how to protect his mind from things like this once upon a time… but Dick could no longer remember how that worked. If it worked.

Instead he watched as the bloody prints on the wall started to bleed on their own, and he imagined it was the blood of his enemies dripping down. There were faces coming out of the…

He closed his eyes. It was better to see nothing at all, than to see this.

Dick wondered if this was what existence really was. A small box, some water, some food, pain.

His eyes would no longer focus on the shadows trying to eat him and he was thankful for that, but that also meant he couldn’t read the red glowing numbers that proclaimed his process in this prison called life.

He was drifting… in and out of awareness… in and out of existence…

Moving was too much of a bother, and sometimes even blinking felt too exhausting. Was he even real? Did Dick Grayson even exist?

He didn’t want to know.

He only knew that this room was real. The grey was real. The glowy numbers were real.

Everything else?

Dick heard his mother call his name. He liked her voice.

Maybe he was dead.

He hoped he was dead. It would be sad if existence truly only consisted of this.

Bruce was whispering sweet nothings in his mind and Dick was grateful – he liked his mentor’s voice when it was this soft. He liked the calmness that washed over him whenever it was Bruce that held him.

“Hey, chum. I’ve got you. It is gonna be alright. Even if you can’t see it… it is gonna be alright. Look at me, chum? Can you look at me?”

The voices were rarely so nice. That was fun, Dick could get used to this. At least it wasn’t Jason crying in pain this time, or his father demanding revenge for his unjustified death. This time it was his dad.

Dick kind of liked that, even with the unfocused lights dancing through his vision, even with the shadows that always tried to claim him.

“Just one response, chum. Just one. A look, a smile, a…a… something. Dick, _please_.”

Dick didn’t react to the voices anymore, that only seemed to make them madder. And he didn’t want to make Bruce mad – he wanted to be able to enjoy this. His muscles were relaxed, his body in a limbo… maybe existence wasn’t just a curse.

“Dick… please. Just one look… my boy, I will get you out of here…. I will bring you home.”

Home sounded nice – but Dick only knew his box. His gray walls, the water, the food, the pain. This could be home as well, couldn’t it? It was all Dick knew after all. It was all he had.

“I will bring you home and then we’ll figure this out”

Bruce’s voice was so nice… Dick had no idea what he had done to deserve it. Instead, he watched the fuzzy red light. He liked its glow, even if he couldn’t read the numbers. Even if he had no idea why it was important.

Dick watched the fuzzy red light and let Bruce’s voice wash away.


End file.
